This essay by Bhanu Vedantam is a voyage into the relationship with his father and the experiences dealing with caste.
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Today, the movers came. They left behind a husk of a home, skeletal concrete that now only holds the memory of a soul. I ran my fingers along the coarse white walls, bidding farewell to every inanimate thing that bore witness to my coming of age.
My parents watched in silence. They didn’t know what to say. They had decided to sell the old, decrepit apartment and move to our new big place in the city.
I was back in V-town, and the last time I talked to my father had been on a phone call about a month ago, on which he launched into one of his countlessly rehashed tirades about how I should get an MBA degree and settle down in the new House in the City with a nice Brahmin girl.
So you can imagine I was avoidant when my father said he wanted to talk to me.
“It makes the most financial sense,” Amma said to me, trying to justify the decision to sell. “This place is in a state of disrepair anyway.”
The family sat on two cotton mattresses, lined against the wall. I could feel the cool wall against my skin.
I was eight when I first came to this home, a freshly anointed brahmachari. Back then, as a Brahmin child who grew up in the UAE, I had only ever heard mention of “dharma” and “Brahmin” from my father’s lips. They seemed to elevate and balloon over my childhood, cold and foreign.
The whole family had been flown out to India. My father had invited all our relatives and staged a huge ceremony.
“It’s very rare to see someone doing it at the right age in the present day! Glad to see someone still following their dharma,” The pujari had said over a cup of filter coffee, in this very hall. My father’s sunburned face lit up with glee. It was really the only thing that excited him – the religious crap.
For three days, I went through the motions dazed and groggy (they often woke me up at 4 am). I did enjoy suddenly being the center of attention for over a hundred people, but I never really comprehended the significance of anything.
“Do you know you get to be a Brahmin only after seven cycles of reincarnation?” my father told me. “It’s very important that we do our dharma, if you want to achieve moksham.”
He loved moksham. Everything he did was for it. I admit, even as a child, I wasn’t completely on board with the logic of it. As I lay in my bed chasing sleep on a school night, I would wonder, if God created us, who created God? What is the purpose of our life? If God created everything, why did he create evil and suffering? If God can see everything, can he also see me slip my hand into my pants when everyone’s asleep?
But I learned very young that questions about it weren’t appreciated. You either got scolded or you got vague answers until the topic naturally changed.
And so the sacred thread of the Brahmin caste was bestowed upon me with much pomp and aplomb. I learned by-heart all the slokas, the mantras, and the motions of prayer. My father trained me diligently, and I tried my best to not make any mistakes. He would get angry if I made a mistake. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I wanted him to be proud of me.
A poignant ache spread through my chest. I didn’t realize that selling this home would be such an emotional blow to me. How often was I really happy in this home? All I can remember are the fights and the threats.
I left the hall, entered the first of three bedrooms, where we had a bookshelf. I lined it up with books until there was no space left, and we had to use the cupboards. This room was where I would come to enter my safe space, nuzzled right in between two fresh woody dry pages. This is where I would daydream about being a famous author, about running away from home, about that girl I liked in high school.
The influence of these books helped me retain my religious cynicism. This inkling that my family was dysfunctional (because they were quite unlike fictional families, I thought) sprouted in me very young.
I returned to Abu Dhabi with pierced ears and eight spots of hair on my bald head, as was tradition. And of course, my first day back at school, I got made fun of, and I cried. Kids make fun of everything. And to a class full of Malabar Christians and Muslims, my new avatar was alien.
I asked for my piercings to be removed because I didn’t want to be teased for being a girl anymore. I was happy that removing it didn’t hurt as much as the piercing had. My mother had overruled my father’s protests. It often worked that way in my home.
Later that year, we moved to India, to this home, while my father stayed back for work. The holes in my ears had closed up, but I found a part of myself wishing I still had them. Back in my mother’s hometown, everyone knew what it meant, and I wanted to feel special.
Everything my father had told me as a child, I began to view through a new lens. I was suddenly in a place where your caste mattered, even though it was veiled by propriety. Not that it hadn’t existed in the UAE. Caste and community underlies all interactions in the Indian diaspora, even amongst a whole other culture.
But in India, caste isn’t as hush-hush. People vote along the lines of caste. Different areas of town are dominated by different communities. My mother would tell me not to touch the maid, not to touch the beggars, to bathe after I got back from the barber, not to serve the worker or even my friends from the same utensils we used. She would disguise it with excuses of cleanliness, but I perceived them as the remnants of untouchability. My father had outright said as much. I only saw him once every few months now. After getting back from the barber, if he happened to be home, he would not let me touch anything in the house, or even sit for a few seconds. I was not to infect the objects of our home with the impurities of a lower caste.
“Don’t eat like a Shudra!” He would say, if I put my plate in my lap. Or if I mentioned a friend with a Chowdary surname he would say, “Don’t be friends with those Kamma people! You know they always cheat you!” He would then proceed to cite examples of some uncle of mine who loaned his Kamma friend money and never got it back, or some other uncle who got “spoiled” by his Kamma friends, eating meat and drinking alcohol. He was always paranoid that my Muslim friends would make me eat meat.
I sigh. The house looks so barren now. The smell of an empty mustiness lingers in the air.
Quietly, my father joins me in my vigil for our home, and I tense up a little.
“I told your mom we shouldn’t sell this place. It’s our area. Everything’s so convenient. But she thinks it’s the right way, now that we have the new House in the City.”
“Our area.” I scoff internally. He meant that it was filled with Brahmins.
“How’s work?” he asks, awkwardly.
“Pretty good. I’ve been getting more responsibility, and I’m expecting a hike.”
“That’s good.”
After some seconds of silence, he lowers his voice conspiratorily. “I need to talk to you. When your mother isn’t around, okay?”
I feel a tinge of annoyance and dread build up in my stomach. The last thing I want to do today is have a conversation about my career decisions or my marriage.
Things changed with my father after we moved to India. Being a million miles away does that, I suppose.
As every man experiences at some point with his father, he had been knocked off his perch as The Hero. I scrutinised him, and I saw more of his flaws, now that I was outside his sphere of influence. My moral compass was guided largely by the books I read, and Enid Blyton’s British sense of propriety was a cornerstone of my formative years.
He had this group of friends from college that he loved to talk about. The “Belt Batch”, he called them. A group of friends composed only of Brahmins – those who wore the thread. I detested it when he talked about that, as though reminiscing on glory days when his caste made him special.
My mother thought of herself as a modern woman, so her “Brahminness” was more subtle. She loved validating my father’s stereotypes. She would gossip about how the Vysyas of our apartment building hoarded gold, though they dressed normally and lived in a flat. When I was much older and braver, I told her not to be surprised if I married a Muslim woman. She scrunched up her nose at that and said, “I think we Brahmins have some habits that only work with other Brahmins, you know?”
I look at the empty cupboards that had once held all the books. I am reminded of the time my father locked up all my books for a few months because he believed they were corrupting me. Just because I began to question the logic of his dictates. A locked crate in my head rattles with anger that boils over, even as an adult. They had taken away my only escape. This memory, I decide to put away.
My sister and I decided to spend the night, while our parents found a hotel room for themselves, since there were only two spare mattresses. I was to drop my father and my mother each at the hotel room; once at a time on the two-wheeler.
Here, my father cornered me into the conversation I had been avoiding all day.
There is an awkward tension between my father and me, as though a third passenger on the scooter. He has struggled to communicate with me since my adolescence.
It’s convenient for me, because it’s too hard to let him in now.
“I didn’t realize you loved this home so much.” He says. “I told your mom that we shouldn’t sell it. Just because the House in the City is bigger and better, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep this.”
“It’s fine,” I say, shortly. “Moving on is part of life.”
He lets the silence rest between us for a while.
“When I die,” he begins, “I want to be buried in Varanasi. And I need my son to be there and perform my last rites.”
My heart sinks. This is not the conversation I was prepared for.
“It is a matter of great punyam for us, do you understand? As per scripture, a man dies four times in his lifetime, once when his kids leave home, once when he gives away his daughter, once on the funeral pyre, and once when his soul leaves his body and the holes in his body close up. Don’t tell your mother this. I’m going to die very soon. In the next ten years. Your grandfather and all his brothers died close to seventy. There’s something wrong with my body, and I must be prepared to die soon.”
The martyrdom in his voice, the sadness of the conversation, the day he chose, all of it makes me irrationally angry. There’s nothing wrong with him, physiologically, I think. He’s 58!
I could see where I got my hypochondriac tendencies from, though.
“I understand, nanna.” That’s all I can say to allay his anxieties now.
My hand travels to my shoulder, and I begin fiddling with the sacred thread between my fingers.
I remember when I had first taken it off, with childish glee, when I was sixteen. I felt cool and rebellious. For a minute. Then I put it back on with an uneasy guilt. It felt too blasphemous.
But I didn’t forget the thrill and freedom of taking it off. I debated the morality of it, however. In my mind, the world was dreadfully dichotomous.
In India, my mother had a tough time raising the two of us alone. She lashed out at us in anger often. I think she was lonely, and there was always the subtle resentment I could sense, that her kids had ruined her life. She had been pushed into her arranged marriage with my father, and her dreams of being a working woman had evaporated in the clutches of the patriarchy.
So I turned into a depressed, anxious teen who felt undeserving of love.
I always thank my stars that I was born at the turn of the millennium, right into the internet age. Conflict was always raging in my mind. The world did not mesh with my rigid understanding of morality. So I turned to the internet for answers. And with conversations around mental health erupting on the internet, I introspected, self-diagnosed and re-examined all the beliefs my parents ever gave me. I adopted Americanisms and navigated political opinions by debating strangers on Reddit, as teens tend to do.
I rebelled by dissociating from religion. The ludicrous nature of our rituals stood out to me more. The subtle contempt when speaking of other castes irked me. I knew that I could not inherit this caste superiority complex. It felt wrong.
In this period of reckoning with the world through art, I debated my morality a lot. One major scruple I had with morality or the legality of things was when I encountered the existence of the LGBTQ movement. It was categorically wrong as per the moral compass of the society I knew. But more and more of the media and the books I consumed featured homosexual relationships; stories of gender transition. I learned from my stories to empathize.
I was prone to agree with my stories. I had long since dismissed my parents and religion as a legitimate source of morals. But it still begged the question, what made something wrong? If being gay is okay, what else is? Was it ‘unnatural’? What makes something ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ in the first place? Who gets to decide what is legal and what isn’t?
One thing everyone seemed to agree on was that hurting other people made things wrong. But besides that, everyone had a different idea of morality. Some people thought being gay would send you to hell, some people thought men wearing women’s clothes was liberating, revolutionary.
But slowly, I began to notice patterns. Morals seemed to change with the ages and with cultures. They were a far less rigid thing than I had previously thought.
One night, well into the early hours of the morning when I should have been asleep, I lay in the dark, simmering in existential dread – and an epiphany struck me.
My underlying assumption all these days had been that the universe had set a predefined list of good and bad things, and if I could just figure out that list, if I knew the “rules”, I could breeze through life. But, for the sake of argument, if we deny the existence of God and hell and heaven, we would see that this list doesn’t exist, and the universe doesn’t deliberately punish rapists or murderers; good people don’t have only good things happen to them, firstly there’s no people that are only good or only evil, there’s no rhyme or reason to the existence of evil and suffering, there’s no God testing us, and everything – your birth, your parents, your town and your nation, your friends and your lovers, your very existence in this moment of time across all of human history – it’s all a game of cosmic chance.
I think that’s when I really moved away from religion. For a few days, I thought of myself as one of the greatest thinkers of our generation, but the internet introduced me to the concept of moral relativism and nihilism, and humbled me. What now seems obvious to me was an incredibly empowering epiphany back then. The nuance with which I could see things, the introduction of The Grey Area, changed my convictions forever.
I got into the music of the devil – Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath and Slayer and Dio; I started smoking weed and eating meat, growing my hair out and reading the postmodernists, Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, Vonnegut. They only cemented my beliefs further.
I moved out as soon as I could, for college, and I kept my parents at a distance I had become used to all my life. I did not try to have a relationship with them. Rather, I could not put myself through that.
At that point, I had stopped wearing my sacred thread. I did not want to be a Brahmin anymore.
When we get to the hotel, my father asks the man at the reception a million pedantic questions, as old men tend to.
I look at his wrinkling skin, and I wonder – what would you think of me if you knew the real me? What if I ripped off this sacred thread now, right in front of you?
Now that I am older, I have the luxury of living away from home, being financially independent. And I can train a kinder gaze on my childhood. I understand my father’s own shitty childhood, and how he perpetuated the cycle of generational trauma.
Once he’s got the room, he follows me to the street. We give each other an awkward one-armed hug. I look into his eyes, weighed down by pain, and I feel it well up in my own soul. I pity the unloved, scared child in us.
I dare not look him in the eye again. I drive away.
On the way back, I try to remember the day, bobbing in the shallow waters of a beach, on vacation towards the end of my college life, when I took off the sacred thread and let it drift into the Bay of Bengal.
I had decided that I would call that the moment I stopped being a Brahmin.
Not really though. I still keep one at the back of my cupboard, to wear when I go home. For now, at least.
Because I still love this man.
Author’s Bio
Bhanu Vedantam is a 25-year old writer born in Andhra Pradesh and based in Bengaluru. He enjoys speculative fiction and literary fiction. Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Toni Morrison are some of his current inspirations. His publishing credits include a poem published in the ‘Undiscovered Journal’, and one published in the ‘BWW Book of Emerging Poets’.